Awsaml

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Awsaml is an application for providing automatically rotated temporary AWS credentials. Credentials are stored in ~/.aws/credentials so they can be used with AWS SDKs. Credentials are valid for one hour and are rotated every hour while the application's running.

In order to rotate credentials, Awsaml takes the following actions

1. Authenticates the user with their identity provider.
2. Reads the SAML authentication response returned from the identity provider.
3. Generates new temporary AWS keys by calling the AssumeRoleWithSAML API.
4. Writes the new temporary credentials to disk.

This flow repeats every hour so the user always has a valid set of AWS keys while the application's running. Awsaml reuses the SAML response from the identity provider, so the user doesn't need to reauthenticate every time.

You can grab prebuilt binaries for Mac, Linux, and Window from the releases page.

Configuration

Configuring Awsaml is a multi-step process that involves a bit of back and forth between Amazon and your identity provider. The general flow looks like this

1. Create a SAML application in your identity provider.
2. Create a SAML identity provider in AWS.
3. Create an IAM role in AWS.
4. Update the SAML application with ARNs.
5. Run Awsaml and give it your application's metadata.

1. Create a SAML application in your identity provider

The only tested identity provider is Okta. To use Awsaml with Okta, you'll need to create a SAML 2.0 application in Okta with the following settings

SAML Settings

Once Okta's created your application, it will show you setup instructions.

Among those instructions will be a URL for a generated XML metadata document that will look something like this:

https://www.okta.com/app/{APP_ID}/sso/saml/metadata

Where APP_ID is the application ID Okta has assigned to your newly created app.

You should do two things with this url:

1. Copy the url and store it somewhere locally because you will need to provide it to the Awsaml desktop application you run later.
2. Download the contents of the url to a file on disk because you will need to supply that file when you create an identity provider in AWS.

A note on naming things (if you are using Okta)

In the next two steps, you will create and name an identity provider and a role. Be sure to choose short names (fewer than 28 characters between the two).

In the step after you create the identity provider and the role, you will need to take the ARNs for the identity provider and role and submit them to Okta. However, the field into which you will paste these values on the Okta website has a 100 character limit which is not immediately evident.

You will need to provide a string in the format:

{ROLE_ARN},{IDENTITY_PROVIDER_ARN}

The ROLE_ARN will be in this format:

arn:aws:iam::{ACCOUNT_ID}:role/{ROLE_NAME}

Where the ACCOUNT_ID is 12 digits long, and the ROLE_NAME is as long as you want it to be.

The IDENTITY_PROVIDER_ARN will be in this format:

arn:aws:iam::{ACCOUNT_ID}:saml-provider/{PROVIDER_NAME}

Where the ACCOUNT_ID is 12 digits long, and the PROVIDER_NAME is as long as you want it to be.

Thus, when combined, the two ARNs will take up 72 characters without considering the number of characters that the names have.

arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXXXX:role/,arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXXXX:saml-provider/

As a consequence, between the name you give to the identity provider and the name you give to the role, you can only use up to 28 characters.

2. Create a SAML identity provider in AWS

Follow Amazon's documentation for creating a SAML identity provider, in which you will need to upload the metadata document you downloaded in the previous step.

Save the ARN for your identity provider so you can configure it in your application.

3. Create an IAM role in AWS

Follow Amazon's documentation for creating an IAM role with the following modifications:

1. In step 2 "Select Role Type"
   1. After clicking "Role for Identity Provider Access", choose "Grant API access to SAML identity providers"
2. In step 3 "Establish Trust"
   1. For 'SAML provider', choose the provider you previous set up
   2. For 'Attribute', choose SAML:iss
   3. For 'Value', supply the Issuer URL provided by Okta when you created the application

The permissions in this role will be the ones users are granted by their the AWS tokens Awsaml generates.

Once the role's created, a trust relationship should have been established between your role and the SAML identity provider you created. If not, you will need to set up a trust relationship between it and your SAML identity provider manually. Here's an example of the JSON policy document for that relationship.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [{
    "Sid": "awsKeysSAML",
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Principal": {
      "Federated": "arn:aws:iam:saml-provider"
    },
    "Action": "sts:AssumeRoleWithSAML",
    "Condition": {
      "StringEquals": {
        "SAML:iss": "issuer"
      }
    }
  }]
}

Replace the "issuer" value for the "SAML:iss" key in the policy document with the issuer URL for your application. Replace the "arn:aws:iam:saml-provider" value for the "Federated" key in the policy document with the ARN for your SAML identity provider.

Save the ARN for the role so you can configure it in your application.

4. Update the SAML application with ARNs

Now that you have ARNs for the AWS identity provider and role, you can go back into Okta and add them to your application. Edit your application to include the following attributes.

Attribute Statements

Replace the "arn:aws:iam:role" value with the ARN of the role in AWS you created. Replace the "arn:aws:iam:provider" value with the ARN of the identity provider in AWS your created.

Multiple Role Support

To support multiple roles, add multiple values to the https://aws.amazon.com/SAML/Attributes/Role attribute. For example:

arn:aws:iam:role1,arn:aws:iam:provider
arn:aws:iam:role2,arn:aws:iam:provider
arn:aws:iam:role3,arn:aws:iam:provider

Special note for Okta users: Multiple roles must be passed as multiple values to a single attribute key. By default, Okta serializes multiple values into a single value using commas. To support multiple roles, you must contact Okta support and request that the SAML_SUPPORT_ARRAY_ATTRIBUTES feature flag be enabled on your Okta account. For more details see this post.

5. Run Awsaml and give it your application's metadata

You can find a prebuilt binary for Awsaml on the releases page. Grab the appropriate binary for your architecture and run the Awsaml application. It will prompt you for a SAML metadata URL. Enter the URL you saved in step 1. If the URL's valid, it will prompt you to log in to your identity provider. If the login's successful, you'll see temporary AWS credentials in the UI.

Building

Awsaml is built using Node and Yarn 3, so make sure you've got a compatible versions installed. Then run Yarn to install dependencies and build Awsaml.

rm -rf node_modules/
yarn install
yarn build

Those commands will create a "out" folder with zipped binaries. If you only want to create binaries for specific platforms, you can set a PLATFORM environment variable before building.

export PLATFORM=linux
yarn build

Allowed values for PLATFORM are darwin, linux and win32. You can build binaries for multiple platforms by using a comma separated list.

export PLATFORM=darwin,linux
yarn build

Similarly, if you want to specify the build architecture, you can set a ARCH environment variable before building.

export ARCH=universal
export PLATFORM=darwin
yarn build

Supported architectures are ia32, x64 , armv7l, arm64, mips64el, universal, or all.

Setup on macOS with Homebrew

A caskfile is bundled with the repository, to install Awsaml with Homebrew simply run:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rapid7/awsaml/master/brew/cask/awsaml.rb brew install --cask awsaml.rb

There might be an error and warning prompt but it should start succesfully downloading right after When download is succesfully installed, a awsaml was successfully installed! prompt is displayed

License

Awsaml is licensed under a MIT License. See the "LICENSE.md" file for more details.

Special Thanks

• Tristan Harward for the app icon.